


burned thrice, born thrice

by orphan_account



Series: The Birth Of Iron [2]
Category: Battle of Tollense River c. 1250 bce
Genre: Gen, Languages and Linguistics, References to Norse Religion & Lore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:48:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22028101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: West of the bend in the river, they try not to think of graves.
Series: The Birth Of Iron [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1585591
Comments: 5
Kudos: 6





	burned thrice, born thrice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ellen_fremedon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellen_fremedon/gifts), [Island_of_Reil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/gifts), [Hokuto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hokuto/gifts), [yuuago](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuuago/gifts), [greerwatson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greerwatson/gifts), [Measured_Words](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Measured_Words/gifts), [mayhap](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayhap/gifts), [sophia_sol](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophia_sol/gifts), [Siljamus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siljamus/gifts), [Fells](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fells/gifts), [Ahsurika](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ahsurika/gifts).
  * Inspired by [sheep into the plain](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8397700) by [orphan_account](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account). 



> it's a lovely 3am on the university of texas at austin proto-indo-european semantic index, and i am a horrible goose

Hegleud woke up.

(Hegleud saw Essem coming over the horizon on a lanky horse. Essem looked like he hadn’t slept; the horse, though, it looked fresh, and it was a warrior’s horse, the kind a chieftain would have. He took Hegleud and a few of the other boy cousins, and they rode east. Hegleud did not like to think about that ride east, about the slowly encroaching scent of gore that rose hour by hour until you were suddenly in a cloud of it, gagging.

Fat summers, lean summers, lean winters. Hegleud looked at what they’d taken so far and knew he’d never have a lean winter again. The horses alone! Never mind the gold, the bronze, never mind the swords and the clubs, the spears and the helmets – just the horses! He hauled over with his hands on his knees and vomited from the stench.

They spent the span of half a day gathering plunder. Every moment of it made Hegleud’s stomach twist. He avoided looking up at the sky, avoided drawing the Sun’s attention. The next quarter of the day they spent setting as many fires as they could: an unseemly way to have the spirit pass to the land of the dead, but they could not hope to bury any of these men before nightfall. At the very least, the stink of the fires fit better in Hegleud’s mouth than the wet rot; as they rode as far back towards home as they could, he and the other cousins comforted each other, saying careful words about forest fires clearing underbrush. They found a lightning-struck tree on the path and camped there, and they all prayed to Lord Thunar. They had piled up broken chariots to burn: let him take them.

Hegleud swore an oath that night, in his sleeping furs. In a moonturn’s time, at the autumnal equinox, he would apologize to the ancestors for the monstrous bloodshed seeping into their earth. He would remind them that he had not done it, but he would take responsibility for not stopping it. He would remit to the ancestors horses and beads. He would give bronze knives to the Sun, and to Lord Thunar, and to the woman who stewards the land of the dead. He would avoid coming east thereafter. No god could purify what had been done to that valley.)

Hegleud sat up. His joints groaned.

(He didn’t like thinking about that day, and at some point over the years he’d managed to bite it back. Only during slaughtering season, when the reek of gore overpowered everything else, did he drop back into it. Rotting manflesh sat heavy in his mouth, and the rings on his fingers, the good strong thatching on the square houses his slaves had raised, his sons, his daughters, his lovely wives, his self – they were _befouled_ with that scent, and he would go to the sea to wash it off.)

He crept out of bed, with more delicacy than he strictly needed – Aikala slept like a rock. It wasn’t quite after dawn. It had rained a little overnight and the sun shone weakly through a grey-streaked sky. Late for him to rise, late for the entire settlement to rise, but it was summer, and sometimes the body needed more sleep than it got. He chuffed at his arms; it wasn’t cold, just unpleasantly moist. The breeze came from the north, bringing sea on it. He chewed on the scent of the sea, and then he turned to the south and took a deep breath. He liked this place, where they had the longhouse, where he was the second, just below oathlord: he liked it more than the place where he’d grown up. He liked being caught between sea and forest, how calm and rich the land was, how tempered by the ocean the winters were. He liked it despite himself.

(“The ancestors have abandoned this place,” the wisewoman cried. She clawed at herself, shaking with grief. The priests flanking her cried too: they wore swan cloaks, swan masks, as they were the birds who flew from life to death and back again. Last night, the wisewoman had gone into the great barrow of the eldest ancestors, as she did at every equinox and solstice. The priests had lit the fires outside the barrow, and she walked in holding the offerings. They all envied her, to be able to sit and eat with the ancestors, to serve them at their most joyous feast, and they all sighed when the swan-priests rolled the boulder back before the tomb and enclosed her in the realm of the precious dead. But when they came back at the dawn, to witness her return to the land of the living, they could hear her hoarse, pitiable screaming. She’d been screaming for hours, and no wonder, locked in the dark with the naked bones and food fit only for devils. She sobbed, and the folk sobbed too, and the heavens grumbled and the sky sobbed with them. Hegleud stood stunned, his heart pounding in his ears: _the ancestors had abandoned them._ When the plague came, the rotting kind, they all knew why.)

He stood out in the yard of the longhouse, rubbing his arms and inhaling the sea, til movement drew his eye. A slave, he thought for a moment, but no, he recognized the gait and waved. The figure pivoted and ran to him, and he said _oof_ and took a step back, so hard was her embrace.

“Hello, sister-in-law,” he said. “What brings you out this early?”

“Something has happened to my husband,” Yagilida said. She was out of breath.

“You’re wet.” Hegleud held her at arm’s length. The bronze disc on her belt shimmered with damp. Yagilida was beautiful, more beautiful than his wives, so beautiful and funny and venomous that no one had ever wondered why Essem hadn’t added a second wife. She had borne six sons, four of whom had survived, and her eyes were near bulging out of her skull. “You’re soaked. Are you all right? Have you been out all night?”

“He woke me leaving.”

“Who?”

“Essem.”

“Essem left?” Hegleud shook his head; he was still a bit sleep-dozy. “What do you mean?”

“You know Ess,” Yagilida said; she grabbed at the bun on the back of her head and squeezed it, so the water would drip out. “He sleeps through the night – ”

“He’d sleep through anything,” Hegleud agreed. Joke unsaid: too dim not to.

“So when he got up – Heggi, I thought he was sleepwalking, and it’s dangerous to wake a sleepwalker, so – ”

She looked near to tears.

“Sister-in-law, you don’t have to explain,” Hegleud said. “I’ll help, whatever it is. Where is he?”

She pointed, and Hegleud had the sudden suffocating weight of rotten manflesh in his mouth, unbidden. He started a jog, and she didn’t hesitate following him.

(“Where’s Anaxitho?” Hegleud asked, at one point, downriver. He’d found a necklace of gold beads strung around the neck of a woman with her skull stove in. She had a bronze spear, as well.

Essem shook his head.

“Where’s Anaxitho?” Byerek asked. She shifted Stera on her hip. Byerek wasn’t in love with Anaxitho or anything, or at least not as far as Hegleud could tell, but the elders had been pestering her about a new husband ever since Stera started walking unaided.

Essem shook his head.

“What happened to Anaxitho?” Esleuda had her hands on her hips. “What have you done with him, my son? Where have you left him?”

Essem kept shaking his head. Eventually they all stopped asking.)

They had been honored to be chosen by the wisewoman to dedicate a part of the farm for the barrows. She had indicated a grove, a little up a ridge. If you stood on the ridge, and if you were tall, you could just barely see the sea. It was slow work, clearing the trees, made slower by the swan-priests constantly correcting the layout, but as Hegleud rose to become second-to-the-oathlord, so did the tumulus, and both were gloried. They buried the slaves in a circle around it, so they could keep it tidy in the next world. Three years ago, it had had its first honored guest. When Leuwa died, dear matriarch, grandmother of the oathlord, mother of four living generations, they’d made sure she settled richly into the land of the dead. The wisewoman had sat up with her during the vernal equinox and emerged at dawn, serene. Everyone exhaled a breath they hadn’t known had been held so long. The older ancestors had found a new home. Grass grew over the tumulus, pleased to guard the elder honored. Those of Leuwa’s line began settling into the earth.

Essem sat cross-legged at the mouth of the barrow, the stone drawn across its mouth. Yagilida clasped her hands in front of her face and put her fingertips on her lips. She said, under her breath, “Of course he comes out when I’m not there.”

“He was _in it_?”

Yagilida said, her voice hollow, “He pulled the slab over the doorway when I tried to grab his arm.”

Hegleud laughed just at the shock of it, and then he nearly retched; it wasn’t anywhere near the solstice, and it’d be a moon or more til the equinox, and Essem wasn’t a wisewoman. Essem leaked death, he was stained with it, he was not just plundering as you would a piece of carrion or an unlucky, ghost-plagued battlefield, but he had _come to the land of the dead_ –

Essem said, “I can hear you two, you know.”

Hegleud winced, and Yagilida closed her eyes and drummed her knuckles on her chin. They both knew a madness with words could be harder to return from than a gibbering madness. One was a fever, to be sweated out: the other buried itself in the bone.

“Essem,” Hegleud said, very kindly, “Yagilida can go back to the longhouse right now. She’ll send for the wisewoman.”

“I’ve talked to her.”

Hegleud stared at him. There had been one time, _one time_ in his life when he knew Essem was thinking about the gods. Essem hunted, and he tended his fields, and he looked after his sons, and that was it. He’d reverted to himself after the journey north, his old self, kind and vague and a little too nervous about other people’s comfort.

(No one had hated Anaxitho, even when he’d killed Theudar. A few of them could honestly say they had loved him. That didn’t mean no one was glad he was gone. Essem had always been a bit dim, but he acted like a moron around Anaxitho. Unbecoming for a husband. No one said it, but they had a good idea of what had happened. Anaxitho, freed slave, unmarried, unpromised, unthinkable, had no one to speak for his murder. Petitioning the gods for a charm of protection against the endless ghosts crowded at the end of the river with the blood of a worthy and unattached man was perhaps the only wise thing Essem had ever done. Byerek was silently mad at him for a few months but she got over it. She was begrudgingly grateful. Alone of the oathlord's sworn families, no one in their line had died of the rotting plague.)

“You haven’t talked to me,” Yagilida said. “I was sitting soaked where you were all night, begging you to come out, and you were just –”

Essem, slightly too innocent face: “I meant the wisewoman.”

Yagilida started laughing, in the hysterical sort of way that no one ever wants to laugh. She bit her knuckles to make herself stop.

“I’m sorry for this,” Essem said. “I know it’s very worrying, but it’s nothing to do with – ” He flopped a hand, vaguely, in a way that took in the barrows and the farm and the longhouse. He looked pleadingly at Yagilida. “I promise you didn’t do anything wrong – ”

“Trust me,” Yagilida said, “I wasn’t thinking that. Not about _me._ ”

Essem snuffled a laugh, and so did Yagilida.

“Please let me get the wisewoman,” Yagilida said. She crouched low, so her skirts brushed the ground. “Please? So _you’ll_ know _you’re_ not doing anything wrong?”

“Well,” Essem said, “I did.” He scratched his beard. “Or it’ll look wrong, for a very long time, but I promise…”

He trailed off. A bird called overhead, deepening the silence.

Hegleud scratched at his sweaty arms. The urge to retch throbbed in his throat.

“I’ve been having dreams,” Essem said, “about stone burning, near the sea.”

“We’re near the sea,” Hegleud said; he had his reassuring tone on, if weakly, the voice for dogs and sad children. “Perhaps you’re just dreaming of home.”

“I really hope I’m not,” Essem said. He rubbed his eyes. “There are so many bodies.”

“In the Valley of Slaughter,” Yagilida said, and Hegleud could feel her shoulders relax. “Aren’t they? That’s very far away.”

“No,” Essem said. He looked faintly offended. “Lida, I know I’m not the wisest of men, but come on. I’d know.”

“The gods can be unclear when they send us dreams,” Yagilida said.

“The ancestors too,” Hegleud volunteered.

“Yes,” Essem said impatiently, “ _which is why I’ve been talking to the wisewoman_.”

“All right, my love,” Yagilida said, “all right, father of my children.” She swayed on her ankles, rubbing the disc on her belt: the movement would have been persuasively, nakedly erotic if it wasn't so desperate. "Perhaps you've talked enough - "

“But she’s _wrong_ ,” Essem said. “So I had to talk to the ancestors. And they’re wrong too.”

The blasphemy was so astonishing that Yagilida lost balance.

“I have been trying,” Essem said. “I have been trying for so many seasons to say that all I did was help a man make his own choice. I have been _trying_ to be satisfied with that. I have _tried_ to look north, look west, look to the ancestors, look away when we bury the slaves, look _anywhere but south_ – ”

His hands had begun to shake.

“There’ve been fires in my head for so fucking long, I almost didn’t notice that it was the wrong sea.”

“What’s that smell?” Yagilida said. Her voice was a croak. She backed away, on her knees.

Hegleud remembered riding west; he remembered it in his nose, in his mouth, and he was startled almost to anger at the shift. Riding west, their clumsy pyres burning behind them – that had been a cold and wretched comfort, but still a comfort. For years, for years, a _comfort_ –

“I’m leaving,” Essem said. He stood up. Black smoke began creeping from the edges of the slab on the barrow door. “I have to do this. It’s midway to the equinox, so it’s the same – the moon is the same as when I told him – it doesn’t matter.” He took in a breath. “It’ll be warm up here. Our children and their children and all the children of their children will have nothing to fear. Don’t worry about Leuwa. And don’t worry about the wisewoman.”

He strode with purpose. They fled him; he passed between them like a ghost.

Early just past dawn, in the summer, when the body needs the most rest – if it had been later in the season, when sleep stays longer, perhaps someone would have been awake –

If he had not been the cousin of the second-to-the-oathlord, if he had not been the father of four sons, if he had not been Essem, who had thoughtfully protected his family from the rotting plague when he showed them where to plunder –

Three years’ journey south, the Earthcracker poured fire into the bowl of the sunken mountain.

Three years’ journey south, the new Qelemakos turned away from a wet cloth and said it's just ship-sickness, Anny –

At the autumnal equinox, the wisewoman slipped into the blackened barrow. She knelt and washed the floor with a cloth of finest wool. She begged forgiveness. She expected none.

She fed the ancestors. They ate Hegleud alive.

**Author's Note:**

> names, assisted into something resembling pre-Proto-Germanic:
> 
> Leuwa - leubh/feminine noun ending - loved one  
> Stera - storos - starling  
> Aikala - aig/feminine diminutive - little oak  
> Theudar - þeudō/ario - people-lord, master of men (think Theoden)  
> Esleuda - *h₂ews/*leuk/feminine ending - dawn-stone: a gem  
> Yagilida - i̯ag/īl/feminine ending - reverent-dark/mud, she-who-respects-the-dead
> 
> at the end of the Nordic Bronze Age (which lasted a lot longer than the Mediterranean Bronze Age and generally includes the area around Tollense and to the west of it), there was a shift, from burials in elaborate tombs of whole bodies to burials in elaborate tombs of cremains. the people of the NBA continued caretaking stone age megalithic tombs. Some of the more impressive NBA sites, such as the rock carvings at bohuslan in southern sweden, are situated near Neolithic tombs. there are quite a few passage tombs in northeastern germany that were maintained in some fashion. some burial and ritual sites saw constant reuse and maintenance for a thousand-plus years, which is pretty cool considering that the cultural shifts in those thousand years probably included, among other things, the complete overtaking of the Neolithic cultures' languages by PIE-derived languages. 
> 
> (meaning they might not be your ancestors, Heggi my guy).
> 
> Yagilida is dressed in vaguely the same clothes as [Egtved Girl.](https://en.natmus.dk/historical-knowledge/denmark/prehistoric-period-until-1050-ad/the-bronze-age/the-egtved-girl/) We know Lord Thunar really likes chariots because chariot warfare went out of fashion in northern Europe two hundred years before the end of the Nordic Bronze Age and yet Thor is still using them in Snorri.
> 
> title is from voluspa stanza 21, the murder of gullveig


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